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I am considering putting the mandrake 9 distro on my laptop (ive heard this can be painful). My major concern is that at the moment i have no hardware router and am using Win XP Internet Connection Sharing. There are a few things i would like cleared up.

1. Will the Linux machine be able to easily access my home NT based file sharing network?

2. Will i be able to connect to the internet using Windows ICS?

3. Are there third party driver writers for Linux as i believe Acer/Ali have no Linux drivers for any of my laptop hardware or will mandrake have these or will generic ones work?

Any respones will be well appreciated

If it is relevent my laptop is an Acer Travelmate 210 sries, the only other hardware is a PCMCIA network adapter (which im sure there are drivers for)

1. Will the Linux machine be able to easily access my home NT based file sharing network?

No, not easily. Look up something called "SAMBA"

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2. Will i be able to connect to the internet using Windows ICS?

Yeah, no problem here.

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3. Are there third party driver writers for Linux as i believe Acer/Ali have no Linux drivers for any of my laptop hardware or will mandrake have these or will generic ones work?

Well, for the most part every driver written for linux is a third party driver. You'll have to check the hardware compatibility database on mandrake's site, which I have happily provided a link to :http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/fhard.php3

1.To access the NT based machine, you will probably have to set up Samba. If you indeed want to learn more about Samba and how to configure it, you can find more about this, in this article.

2.When you install Mdk 9.0 it will probably auto detect your network card. As far as I know and done, you have to set the Windows NT box, to be the gateway for the laptop. Since the Windows NT box I presume has the IP 192.168.0.1, when you install Mdk 9.0 when you reach the configuration part for your network card, put this IP (or the IP the Windows NT box has on the LAN) as the gateway. You allso have to edit /etc/resolv.conf and specify the IP of the nameservers of your ISP.

3.You cand find a complete list of the supported Mdk 9.0 hardware here . Some Acer/Ali have drivers for linux. To find out more about who makes drivers you should probably search some developers. You can find out more about them on the Mdk 9.0 site

Ok im up it was a real easy installation every seems fine apart from one thing the mouse pointer and desktop (default KDE) seem desync'd as a complete linux n00bie i have no idea where to start here any ideas?

SAMBA comes standard with Mandrake 9. Even if you just download the ISO's You can share and universal type files (*.html, *.txt, *.mp3, etc). you will be able to grab M$ based files but to use them you might need some special software.